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- Convenors:
-
Blake P Kendall
(HKMW)
Pavel Borecký (University of Bern)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 15
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the employment of 'Fiction' and the 'Imagination' in ecological and environmental enquiries. Discursively rooted in experimentation with 'more-than-human' methods and modalities, we explore how materialist globalised systems are re-imagined.
Long Abstract:
Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi), is heralded as an emerging genre of contemporary literary and filmic praxis, and substantiates interdisciplinary experimentation with Anthropology. In recognising the contentious distinctions of local and globalised environments, the abstraction of Climate Change and the 'Future(s) of Ecology' posits a challenge to anthropologists. Collective amnesia of a past, and imaginings of a future, foreshadows a materialist present. The emergence of the 'New Pangaea' (Rosenzweig 2001) reconstitutes a comprehension of the 'causality' within the global ecosystems, transitioning from a Darwinian order of 'adaptation,' into the methodological framework of tracking the biological schisms of the Anthropocene.
In response, this panel investigates the employment of 'Fiction' as an ethnographic method and as a mode of representation in Ethnographies of Ecology. With a particular focus on 'more-than-human' and 'non-human' anthropologies, biological and mediated frameworks transition from the Cartesian dualism (of human & nature) into fractured narratives of multivocality and polyphonic qualities. It is through formic innovation and 'aesthetics' that the very confines of knowledge production, haunting such enquiries, are overcome; as witnessed with the development of interdisciplinary relations with arts and natural sciences, and the experimentation of audio-visual / sensory ethnography.
This panel posits the 'promise' of innovative and experimental modalities of the New Pangea Ecosystems and seeks to scrutinise the mutual dichotomy of materiality and the imagination. Does 'fictionality' of informant's engagement and comprehension of broader ecology substantiate an insight into an empirical 'now'?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper presents the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer and the ways it grapples with the place and role of humans in 'Nature'. Area X - the setting of The Trilogy - is an uninhabited and abandoned area in the USA that 'Nature' has begun to reclaim, much like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer and the ways in which it grapples with the place of humans in 'Nature' as a means of thinking through the ways in which we might draw inspiration from fiction to navigate the Anthropocene concept. Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the AWG, has argued, "the scientific question of the Anthropocene can only be answered through an act of science fiction" (Lorimer, 2017:12). Moreover, sci-fi narratives closely reflect the writings of social and cultural critics of the time.
By analysing a set of sci-fi narratives that regularly depict blighted radioactive landscapes like Chernobyl to speculate on the future of humans and nonhumans in a contaminated world, my forthcoming PhD research will ask how we might configure human-animal relationships and practices of care towards the nonhuman in anthropogenic spaces of contamination as they proliferate.
Area X, then, the setting of The Southern Reach Trilogy, is an uninhabited and abandoned area in the USA that 'Nature' has begun to reclaim, much like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Area X presents dangers to the humans who enter it: people return with memory loss and cancer, whilst others do not return. A mysterious life force (or alien fungus) is responsible for producing biological novelty, transforming humans into animals, and mimicking/cloning humans.
Area X will be analysed through a posthumanist lens. In particular, the apparent dissolution of the subject when humans enter Area X will be discussed alongside the flourishing of non-human nature in human-abandoned spaces.
Paper short abstract:
When an anthropology student and his informants resurrect a script idea from a Hollywood Film Studio, what ethnographic insight is learnt about deforestation in Sarawak, Malaysia? Exploring fiction filmmaking as a method and modality in ecological enquiries.
Paper long abstract:
At the height of deforestation in Sarawak during the 1980s and 90s, environmentalists campaigning against logging employed a rhetoric highlighting the extensive nature of medicinal plants, as an untapped resource of the forest. This global campaign, regarded as the birthplace of the modern environmental movement, highlighted the Penan's extensive knowledge of medicine plants in an attempt to capture the collective imaginations of the global consumers of tropical hardwood products.
Universal Studios were developing an Ecohorror film, where the Penan's medicinal-plant knowledge saves the world from the threat of a deadly virus outbreak. The script was never finished, the film never made, and the deforestation continued. It was however, during fieldwork between 2015 - 2017, when traces of the script were uncovered, that this enquiry resurrected the story in contemporary context - post deforestation.
In this paper I explore fiction filmmaking as an ethnographic method, through experimentation with re-enactment and polyphonic narratives. With a reflexive practise, the relationship between anthropologist, informant and the camera explicitly grounds the practise-led-nature of enquiry. Narrative and linear structures are interrogated for their de-commodifying properties, posed here as a method to enter field sites of extensive environmental exploitation.
Climate Fiction, made popular in literary and filmic practise, has developed as a genre exploring the 'contingency of futures'. Appropriated from the abstract data of climate-change, with narrative elements of story, the often dystopic fictions explore material realities, with imagined possibilities. This enquiry re-contextualises our 'climate fictions' into the empirical 'now' through Penan informants scrutinising the global stakeholders representations their lives their forest.
A response.
Paper short abstract:
From an anthropological perspective and addressed in a polymorphous way mixing written and audio-visual materials, this survey investigates how the emergence of E.M.Hives in Western countries could enhance the age-old interspecies relationship of humans to honeybees and honeybees to humans.
Paper long abstract:
This research project investigates E.M.Hives: a new trend in beekeeping emerging in beekeepers' backyards in Western countries over the past few years. Broadly speaking, an E.M.Hive is a beehive filled with multiple and various sensors, with the purpose of tracking and recording bee behaviour, ultimately aspiring to help beekeepers develop less intrusive and time-consuming techniques. The recent price drop of certain technologies has enabled companies to offer 'relatively' cheap electronically monitored hives and, incidentally, created an uptrend for DIY ones. Following beekeepers, scientists and E.M.Hive makers in the field and online, the survey - based on a multi-species and multi-sited ethnography - investigates the following: How E.M.Hives could enhance the age-old interspecies relationship of humans to honeybees and honeybees to humans. Indeed, such technologies bring beekeepers closer to their bees by providing constant access to their colonies through the internet of things. Moreover, sensory collected data provides beekeepers, so far, with information out of the human sensory perception about the health and behaviour of colonies. Hypothetically, this data could provide tools to decipher aspects of the honeybee's complex communication system. This research is addressed in a fractured way and follows the principle of 'multivocality' (Pink, 2001), hence, the narrative combines (1) a paper built upon the conducted ethnography, supported by examples derived from Science-Fiction films and literature and (2) audio-visual materials, which offer an experience of enhanced interspecies relationships through new technologies and an immersion within the sensorial 'Umwelt' of bees.
Paper short abstract:
Could fictionality be the appropriate means of how to "rewild" ethnography and "re-enchant" imagination in response to the new Climatic Regime (Latour)?
Paper long abstract:
In my paper I will take a cue from the fragment of sensory ethnography film "In the Devil's Garden" (Borecky) in order to contemplate the "rupturing" effect of non-diegetic elements in Audiovisual Ethnography. Next, considering the example and the key orientation points animating recent discussions, I will sketch the vital (dis)junctions in between the projects of "observational cinema" (MacDougall) and "dark ecology" (Morton). Finally, I will encourage us to set the frame beyond "embodied vision" and potentially blinding tension of fiction/non-fiction binary, and will tentatively propose the term sympathetic to the ecologically-oriented inquiries - "entangled vision" - to situate the viewer in a certain relation to the world of matter that would affectively guide more-than-human attention towards "weird openness" of ecological awareness (Morton).